I have two upcoming readings I wanted to let folks know about. Both are during AWP (a national conference for writers). Both are group readings but both are filled with talented poets. I’m really excited. If you’re looking to see some exciting readings, I hope you’ll drop by!

Lambda recently interviewed critic Daniel Mendelsohn and he stated, “ [a] book that is only meaningful to the gay reader cannot be a great book. It is precisely the gay book’s ability to be interesting to a straight reader that makes it a great book. [….] What makes literature literature is precisely its ability to go beyond borders, beyond identities.” Any thoughts on Mendelshon’s views concerning literature?

I think debates over what makes a book great are largely among writers and people who teach literature. The rest of us I don’t think really care. I’d say we’re more interested in whether we connect with a book, meaning whether it excites us, compels us, shows us the world in a new way, makes us laugh, arouses us, makes us want to read more by the same author. I happen to love the writing of the African American gay poet Essex Hemphill—so much so that I reissued one of his books, Ceremonies. But do straight people read him? Do gay people even read him? Does the answer to either question reflect on the merits of his writing? Does it matter ultimately? More important to me is the fact that his poem to his mother, “In the Life,” still makes me cry after 15 years. That closing line about her never noticing “the absence of rice and bridesmaids” will forever choke me up, and how much greater can literature get than that?

So obviously it was such wonderful news yesterday about Richard Blanco being named the inaugural poet! I’ve been watching the news come out and have come across four pieces I think worth sharing about this, below. The news has been picked up by everyone of course, but I focused on pieces that were in some way more than just a reporting of the news.

LA TIMES: snippet: “Growing up gay and Cuban American was an even bigger challenge. In the poem “Queer Theory, According to My Grandmother,” Blanco writes of the many admonitions he received growing up.

“At a poetry reading a woman once asked me to share something about myself that no one would know directly from reading my bio or my work,” he says on his website. “Somewhat embarrassed, I told the audience about my poetry dance — a little Michael Jackson-inspired shtick I do around the house in my pajamas when I am high from a good-poem day.”

2) Peter Covino at Lambda Literary Foundation:
“Clearly, Richard understands and is skilled at harnessing the real radical power of poetry (radix in Latin) as in the root of poetic language, and its importance for larger American culture. Richard Blanco’s work is extraordinary in its ability to tell a clear and compelling story filled with vivid imagery culled from various cultures, and in the subtle and inimitable way he suggests that no language has primacy over another.

He seems to be telling us we need to be inclusive and compassionate, not dismissive because someone’s accent is different from our own. What an important message for children and people of all backgrounds to hear during the inauguration.”

3) Don Share in the WashPo said that Blanco’s poems “sound like so many people in this country. He works in Spanish and English, a mixture that is our native language, and he makes it sounds like real poetry. This is poetry that speaks for and from a great number of Americans. He gives a voice to the kinds of experience that people undergo every single day. Even people who don’t want to read it themselves can understand the value of a moment in which we say that this country is made of poetry.”

I was a panel show on HuffPost Live yesterday. It was quite an experience. I can’t bring myself to watch the archived version of the show, but if you want to see me argue what I wrote about in my HuffPost article (on a panel with a Tea Partier, a Gay Republican and the awesome editor of HuffPost’s Gay Voices blog), then by all means.. have at it! AND VOTE TODAY!

I wrote this over at the HuffPost Gay Voices site. I shared it on Facebook but also thought I should post it here.

As I said on Facebook, you may not agree with the hard-line tack I take in it, and that’s okay. But my hope was to make folks realize that when we vote for someone who would deny others’ rights, it may have repercussions in how we see our family and friends, a theme that’s been taken up recently in some viral ‘open letters’ and such. In no way am I suggesting we should disown family members. I hope my message, as point-blank as it is, is much nuanced than that! If you care to, please feel free to share, like, etc.

just something I’m working on and wanted to share as I way to motivate me…

SMITHEREENS

The boy in the car next to us on i-90 isn’t even a cinder, or a broken piece to stab into, or a flinty fossilized fingernail we could use to reconstruct the homo-us that speeds along here, with candor spilled in the cupholder, the steering wheel slick with conversation’s cancer, and deep in the engine a cylinder that twists and pumps–

–or else what does it do?… something we imagine we know, something we think we could describe with a fucking metaphor or a goodamm simile (I AM A CRATER OF MEANING WITHOUT YOU)….but when, in a moment, something goes terribly wrong. we will not think part/shaft/fluid...we will think “turbine” or something other shibboleth that keeps the car moving…we will think, in a moment as thin as a (l)ash, that the boy in the car next to us isn’t looking at you or me but his own reflection, the illusion dark and itself a death, a flash, not even a cinder.

…poet Aaron Shurin considers the question “What is prosody?” in light of the current movement away from meter and traditional forms. Shurin looks at what new elements are at work in contemporary poetry, such as collage and sonic play, referencing both classical and current models, from Homer and Shakespeare to Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Michel Palmer and Lisa Jarnot. Shurin explores some of the ways in which poetic craft continues to make meaning in contemporary poetry.